on waiting

The Lord is teaching me the discipline of waiting.

I feel as though my whole being is in a season of waiting right now: waiting for the winter to pass, waiting to be married, waiting to start my life.

But maybe I am waiting for the wrong things?

In Andrew Murray’s Waiting on God, he urges readers to practice the discipline of waiting only on God, and nothing and no one else. Maybe my focus is wrong- while I am waiting for certain things to happen in my life, God is asking me to direct my attention to Him in the waiting. So perhaps waiting isn’t really waiting at all, since He is already with me.

Perhaps the more I wait on Him, the less I will be concerned with time passing and getting the things I want, because He alone will be my satisfaction. Perhaps this is the very season He wants to transform and prepare me for what is to come, instead of just allowing time to pass without growth or change.

Waiting is hard, and there are right and wrong ways to do it. I don’t want to do it the way I’ve always done: rushing through, only to arrive to the anticipated thing and be disappointed it’s not everything I hoped and dreamed, meanwhile missing everything that God had been doing leading up to it.

Although so much good is ahead, and although I am becoming weary in the waiting, I have to believe that this can be the best time if I invite Him into it. I have to believe that He is sustaining me in the waiting and hoping to be my truest companion throughout. That He is working in and through me as I trust Him and surrender my impatience and frustration with the now. I have to believe that there is important work to be done here in the present, that I am exactly where I am supposed to be and have a purpose to fulfill.

Friends, our life is here and now, not in the future. Whatever you are waiting for, it will come, but you will regret if you don’t truly live on your way to it.